Chelsea have long struggled to find support from neutrals – our former editor is an exception – but signing Kante must surely have helped. After all, nobody would wish anything but good things upon the France midfielder.
Here are just some of the reasons why it’s impossible not to love Kante.
He used to pick up rubbish
Born to Malian immigrants in Paris, Kante used to help his father collect rubbish from the streets as a child, walking for miles around the suburbs in the east of the city looking for valuable waste.
Even as a youngster, he showed a work rate that would go on to serve him well in his football career…
He did not have it easy
Having started his football career with JS Suresnes, an amateur club in the west of Paris, Kante did not get picked up by a professional club, Boulogne, until he was 19.
He made his debut on the final day of the Ligue 2 season in 2012 before making his breakthrough in the third tier the following season and then spending two years at Caen, helping them to promotion and then survival in Ligue 1.
He got his dream move to England with Leicester City in 2015 as a 24-year-old but lost none of his humility and remained in touch with his old JS Suresnes coach, Pierre Ville.
Ville told Goal of the midfielder: “He never said no, and he did not speak much.
“When he was given instructions, he would say ‘yes’, then he would leave, but he understood things very quickly. His behaviour makes the people around him take him as a little brother.”
He wanted to run to training
When Kante joined Leicester, he treated himself to a second-hand Mini Cooper. But he did not even initially believe he needed a car at all.
According to The Guardian’s Daniel Taylor, ‘Kante reckoned it was possible to run into training every day and had to be persuaded that it wasn’t usually done that way in the Premier League.’
Previously, Kante had often travelled to training in France on a push scooter with a backpack.
He kept his Mini Cooper
Kante, of course, left Leicester for Chelsea after just one year, earning a dramatic wage rise in the process. But he saw no need to upgrade his car.
In fact, after he was involved in a crash in it on his way to Stamford Bridge ahead of Chelsea’s League Cup tie against Arsenal in January 2018, Kante drove it to training two days later – with the wing mirror held on by gaffer tape and the front wheel arch still missing.